Tag: Social media
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Google+ is sexy. People have been raving about it for a month now. A whole entire month! That’s like… years in today’s tech world. Time-on-planet notwithstanding, over 25 million users have signed up, with no real signs of slowing, and the more people who jump in, the more you hear about how cool Google+ is, how Google got it right (finally!), and how people — even high-profile types — are intent on abandoning Facebook and Twitter.

While it is a little early, in my opinion, to make such brash and sweeping movements in the ever-tenuous social media space, Google+ appears to address many frustrations held by users of the current major social networks. This is the same thing that happened when Facebook slapped around and eventually sat on MySpace and Friendster. The main difference here is, due to the widespread adoption of social media into every day life (thanks to Facebook and Twitter), it’s all happening at lightning speed.

But is it real? Is it sustainable? What do you think about it?

Me? I’m definitely enjoying Google+. I like the feel of it. I like the ease in which I can decide who to communicate with, and how easy it is to find new information that I enjoy reading about. Mostly, though, I like that the users are, as a whole, so much more engaged. I don’t know if it is the way Google+ doesn’t force false friendships down your throat, or if it’s because you can actually express yourself without space limitations. Maybe it’s just because Google+ is new and shiny. Either way, I find myself talking with old contacts and meeting new people who ask me questions, answer questions, and otherwise generally converse in a way that feels much closer to blog or forum conversations. It’s nice.

It’s also worth noting that both Facebook and Twitter felt like that for me, once upon a time, before I was inundated by games requests or forced to sift through real people vs those who only viewed me as another leg up in the follow-game. Google+, as it grows, will probably experience similar challenges, which may lead me to once again consider only communicating by phone, in person, via email, blog comments, or (heaven forbid!) snail mail.

What about you? Now that you’ve had a chance to try out Google+, what do you like about it? How do you feel it compares to Facebook and Twitter — does it make you think of dropping them or campaigning to get your family and close friends on board with the new and shiny? Maybe you think that it’s all a bunch of over-inflated hype… just one more example of the media-fed bubbles that have a habit of unexpectedly bursting?

No sooner did I write about a service yesterday to find people on Google+, than mentions of another service started popping up in my Google+ stream. This one might be even better, especially if you want to search by city or topic.

Google+ is all the rage among the tech-geeks of the world right now. It’s the tech geek — and social geek — media equivalent of a major presidential upset or natural disaster. And with a new Google product, it could end up being either. It really depends on your level of cynicism when it comes to Google launches. Their efforts in the social tech space, while fantastic from the innovation perspective, have fallen flat repeatedly when it comes to adoption. And when I say flat, I mean a fall from a tall, tall building that ends with something reminiscent of a pancake. Or a crêpe.

So I’m curious: where do you stand on the Google+ front?

For me, I’m definitely interested and excited to try it out if and when it ever gets to me. However, I’m more than a bit cautious when it comes to the “Google+ will change social media and business as we know it” spiel. Sure, it’s possible that Google may kill, or at least finally be able to compete with Facebook and Twitter, but we’ve heard all of that before. Hello Google Buzz — and damn you Google Wave.

Frankly, I’m a bit tired of tech media spinning new products like this out of proportion. I’m tired of hearing about unproven products that are destined to kill proven products, especially when the creator has a poor track record of success and their only real merit is that the creator is a tech giant. What has been proven, time and again, is that — if you’ll excuse the age-old, multi-layered saying — size doesn’t matter.

So, what do you think? With the failures of Google Wave, Buzz, Orkut and Sidewiki drag Google down yet again? Is Google+ as amazing as it sounds? Even if it is, do you think it has a prayer of taking on Facebook and/or Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

With all of the information, files and, well… stuff we have stored online, it can be a bit complicated to sift through it all when you need to go back and find something. Greplin makes that sort of search a whole lot easier. It indexes several of your online accounts, not the least of which are Facebook, Dropbox, and Gmail, and works like your own personal Google.

Greplin has been around since the latter part of 2010, and entered public beta in February of this year. Since then, they have been adding more and more services, and have even developed a Chrome extension that plugs them right into your Gmail — for a search experience that is arguably better than Google’s built in functionality.

Greplin is free to use for the most part, indexing up to 10GB worth of data from services like Twitter, Gmail, and other personal Google services like Gcal, Docs and Contacts, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Dropbox. If you want to index accounts like Evernote, Google Apps, and business-related services like Basecamp and Salesforce, however, you will need a premium subscription — which is only $4.99 per month ($49.99/year). There are also a few services that are unlockable via recommendations to friends, such as Tumblr, Google Reader, and Del.icio.us.

If you have a need to search through your online files and life in general, it doesn’t get better than Greplin. The interface is fantastic, the instant search feature saves time, and it actually performs better and faster than Google even in the search giant’s own services. The Chrome extension is a nice touch, as well, as it also plugs into the Omnibar, allowing you to search your data by simply typing the letter g, followed by a space and your search term.

For some of our posts, we do like Lifehacker and other sites, finding articles about tech that interests us and then creating a summary post that links to the original article — replete with our own opinions, of course. :) One of my favourite sites is Web.AppStorm.net, which is part of the Envato network, and a great resource for web app reviews and articles. For this particular Web AppStorm-related summary post, I’m going to talk about Extragram, a fantastic web app interface for social photo-sharing service Instagram.

So why did I bother with that odd intro? Well, this time around, I have the pleasure of linking to none other than… well… me! My first article went live on Web AppStorm on Monday, and I didn’t want you guys to miss out. Read on for a summary of the sweetness that is Extragram!

If you’ve had the chance to use Instagram at all, you will have noticed that it is more than just another photo-app that has a few fancy filters. It not only makes your pictures look cool, it also has its own very Twitter-like social network. You can follow users’ photo-streams, they can follow yours, there’s commenting, conversation, @mentions, the whole deal. You can even share your photos on the big social networks and microblog sites. What you can’t do with Instagram is view or interact with your social account — or even your own photos — outside of your mobile device. That changed rather quickly once Instagram released its API in February.

Since then, there have been several web apps that have popped up with the sole purpose of creating a comparable, or even better user experience on a screen that doesn’t fit into the palm of your hand. Some other notables are Gramfeed, Instgre.at, and Webstagram, but for a slick and fully-featured user experience, the web app you want is Extragram.

Extragram stands out from the other web apps by doing two things: getting out of its own way, and adding extra features that compliment the Instagram experience.

Here are the highlights:

Content-focused, consistent user experience

Easy commenting and photo liking

Navigation with mouse or keyboard

Grid and Filmstrip views

Map View to discover great photos and users near to you or anywhere in the world

Tag-based and “what’s hot” discovery

Sharing your own photos on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr

Allowing other users to share your photos (opt-in, configurable)

The keyboard navigation is a nice touch, and works reasonably well — though it could be a bit tighter, overall. Other than that, Extragram is a great all ’round experience and the perfect compliment to Instagram. I highly recommend giving it a shot.

I’ll be writing for Web AppStorm fairly regularly over the next while, and am considering doing more summary posts here on 40Tech to make sure the readers here don’t miss out on the cool web apps I’ll be talking about. Before I commit to that, though, I would love some opinions from you about it. Let me know in the comments or send me a message via my contact form, Twitter, LinkedIn, or my personal site.

Have you ever tried looking backwards in Twitter or Facebook? It’s not easy. There was that funny conversation, link, or photo that one time that you suddenly feet the need to take a look at again, but when you tried to find it, you were faced with over a year’s worth of scrolling, waiting, scrolling, waiting, and then yet more scrolling? That’s one of the downsides of a world run by micro-updates — there are a lot of them. You could try using the built in search, or even Google, but it’ll probably be a chilly day down south before you find that elusive memory. That’s where Memolane comes in.

Memolane is a new web app that allows you to view content from multiple social media services in a single timeline that is easy on the eyes, and easy to search through. The timeline is scrollable and broken down into days, with the tweets, photos, updates, et al, that you posted online each day listed vertically in expandable memo bubbles. You can connect Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Trip.it, and more — and you can even add in RSS feeds to pull in custom content. I found that I was able to access Twitter updates as far back as February 2010, and Facebook updates, especially photos, all the way back to 2007. Clicking the timeline bar on the bottom of the window made for quick trips to the dates I was looking for, and the search is actually pretty powerful, so long as you don’t enter hash-tag symbols (#).

An easy way to find your old online memories isn’t all that Memolane is good for, however. You can also embed lanes into web pages (see it in action below), and connect with friends to create stories together around shared experiences. It’s a bit like an online scrapbook, really. In fact, Memolane may be adding a print aspect that will allow for real scrapbooking — digital life making it full circle back to the real world.

I like Memolane. It’s easy to set up and use, it allows me to find things that I may have never found otherwise, and it has per-memo and per-service privacy settings that make the sharing bit worry-free. I did find that, the further I went back in time, the more sparse the updates became, but it is entirely possible that that has more to do with the connected services than with Memolane itself. Also, it’s free — and awesome. That’s a good combination in my books.

Normally I try to avoid doing Evernote posts every week, but this latest update is too big to pass up! It marks an end to Evernote’s stoic insistence that its service is strictly for capturing information, not sharing it — and if that wasn’t huge enough, the overhaul to the web app makes Evernote a pleasure to use on machines and OS’s without a desktop version. Excited yet? If you’re an Evernote fan, you know you are! See below for details.

UPDATE: The recent pre-release version of Evernote Desktop for Windows (4.3.0.4293) has added social sharing features, including Twitter, which is not yet included in the web app. Word and character counts have also been added, along with a few other niceties and bug fixes.

The first thing you will notice when you log into the web app is that the new interface refreshingly familiar, adopting a three-panel approach that is very much like the desktop version. Notebook stacks are also included, as well as snippet view — which provides a preview of the note’s content to speed up browsing — and the ability to CTRL/CMD + click multiple notes and drag them to notebooks, tags, or trash. The easy to use updated interface also includes a handy toggle to control auto-save — a handy feature when writing in shared notebooks.

While the update is impressive, it’s not perfect yet. For example, some of the more advanced functionality, like filtering, printing, attaching files, viewing note history, and creating saved searches, is still only available in the older version of the web app. If you want or need any of these features, you will need to switch back to the archaic mode for the time being.

I love the work that Evernote put into the new version of the web app, but am absolutely thrilled by their decision to include some social sharing capability! Until now, I honestly thought that the only way to share notes I collected would be using tools like Springpad and Shelfster, but Evernote’s inclusion of Facebook sharing, with plans to add Twitter in the near future, gives users the added freedom they need in today’s social web. It would be nice to see them open up sharing to the same extent that Springpad has, but baby-steps, yes? Sharing to Facebook, (soon) Twitter, via email, or by adding a link into your social platform of choice will have to be enough for now. You can also revoke shares at your discretion, which is handy. The Evernote blog promises that the new sharing features will find their way into their other apps in future updates.

So how excited are you about Evernote’s foray into the modern web — and its revitalized web app too, of course?

Having many friends is classically considered a desirable thing, leading to things like wealth of spirit, a good self-image, and a generally happy life. Not so in the modern days of the internet, where terms like “friend” are used as a label for the barest acquaintance, and sometimes even for enemies. In fact, in a recent study by psychologists from Edinburgh Napier University, it was discovered that the amount of “friends” you keep on Facebook may be linked to heightened feelings of anxiety and stress.

200 students were surveyed, and it was discovered that at least 12% of them felt that Facebook made them anxious. Each of those 12% maintained an average of 117 “friends,” while the remaining 88% kept an average of 75. Some other interesting findings were as follows:

Many felt a great pressure to be on Facebook, but there was “considerable ambivalence” as to its benefits.

Stress from Facebook use was caused by many different stimuli, including “feelings of exclusion, pressure to be entertaining, paranoia, or envy of others’ lifestyles.”

63% would delay replying to friend requests.

32% felt guilty rejecting friend requests.

10% didn’t like receiving friend requests at all.

The word “friend” could be the main cause of Facebook-related stresses. Perhaps the social media giant should come up with a proprietary name they can trademark, or use something closer to the word “acquaintance” as opposed to a word that is meant to engender feelings of warmth, familiarity, and long term trust. Keeping things as they are, however helps to foster an environment where users, who are still emotionally tied to the meaning of the word friend (no matter how watered down it has become), feel compelled to log on, invite others, and be a part of the service — and maybe more due to its negative aspects instead of the purported positives.

Perhaps we should all just bite the bullet and prune our lists down to our actual friends?

If you are one of the people who put up your hand — stop that. This is text and I can’t see you. Know, however, that you are quite possibly more connected and in tune with the techieverse than your now shame-faced tech-writer. Somehow, for reasons unknown to all but the almighty Goog itself, my keenly developed tech senses missed this wonder entirely! But, that’s all behind me, now. I’ve seen the light, got an invite, and have been playing with the world’s latest, greatest — and Google Chrome based — social browser for several days now.

Here’s what I’ve discovered:

RockMelt does for Chrome what Flock did for Firefox, but where I found Flock a bit overwhelming in its attempt to integrate social elements into the browser, RockMelt has what feels like it might be just the right mix. One almost has to wonder why Google didn’t think to do this in the first place. If they had integrated Sidewiki and Google Buzz in with the configurable social elements that RockMelt has brought into play, making them a part of the Chrome browser (and by extension, the OS) itself, both of those tools might have seen a much stronger and longer term user base.

In any case, RockMelt, which is still in beta, has a lot of good going for it. There are still a few hiccups, as is to be expected, but even so, the social Chrome is pretty appealing. This is a good thing — it means that Netscape founder Marc Andreesen’s money has been well spent.

Key Features of RockMelt

Collapsible Sidebars

The primary difference between RockMelt and Chrome, aside from the fact that you have to log into Facebook to use the browser, is the left and right sidebars. Both are collapsible, about a centimetre in width and contain pretty buttons, often full of people’s faces. On the left, is the Facebook chat column, which shows you which of your Facebook friends are online, allows you to view their latest activity with a hover or a click, chat with them, send them a message, or post on their wall. You can also set up a favourites list in this column, and switch between it and the general tab with a single click.

All of this Facebooking takes place just below a miniature of your own profile picture (top left), which, when clicked, allows you to toggle your Facebook Chat availability, as well as update your social network status — including multiple Twitter accounts, if you decide to add them.

On the right edge of the page, you really get to dig in and configure RockMelt to suit both your browsing and social networking needs. Facebook and Twitter buttons give you access to both of those services, showing your feeds in real time. You can interact with items in the feeds as you would expect to be able to, liking, commenting, retweeting, etc. In Twitter, you can access all of your lists and your @messages, but I didn’t see anything for saved searches or DM’s. Also, if you have a lot of lists, you currently are not able to scroll to the ones that get cut off at the bottom of the page. The Facebook button gives access to people in both your main and custom profile lists, and your profile button right below it gives access to your notifications, photos and wall. I found the limited nature of the Facebook access — no pages, message centre, groups, or places — a bit surprising, but it will likely improve as the browser gets closer to official launch.

The right sidebar also serves two other important functions, it has a few other already integrated networks, like YouTube, and it allows you to add custom feeds so you can keep track of your favourite websites — it even makes suggestions based on the sites you visit most — and it is the home of your Chrome extensions. I like the way RockMelt handles extensions much better than the way Google does it. For one, I can decide on optimal placement of my extensions — and they will stay that way. Google’s insistence in making things rearrange themselves based on their perceptions of my usage has always driven me crazy. I also like the fact that the sidebar is collapsible, and it doesn’t shrink the size of the URL bar. Finally, If I am not using an extension that often, but don’t want to uninstall or disable it, it is simple to just remove it from the column/dock.

The main problem with RockMelt at the moment, especially if you have a lot of Facebook friends in your favourites, or a lot of extensions, is that the sidebars don’t scroll. Any more than 15 items, total, in either sidebar, and the ones furthest down can not be accessed. Also, the floating window that appears when most extension buttons are clicked is a fixed width element. This causes a problem with some extensions that are too wide for RockMelt. Hopefully these are things that will be rectified in a near-future update.

RockMelt also shares most other major features of Google Chrome, such as the new web apps area and browser synchronization. The apps are not as thoroughly integrated as they are with Chrome, being little more than just shortcuts, and browser sync is only available between other RockMelt implementations. It was a little bit annoying having to search out and re-add all of my apps and extensions, but wasn’t that difficult.

Social Sharing

Sharing what you find while surfing in RockMelt is an extremely easy process. There is a giant button to the immediate right of the URL bar, and it allows for Facebook and Twitter sharing with ridiculous ease. I wish there were a send by email button, though, then I could drop the Shareaholic extension; free up some space. Speaking of email, there is what looks like an email button on the top right of the browser. Don’t be fooled. It is not for your email at all. It is really just a suggestion list of who to send your invites to. I find this choice on RockMelt’s part to be kind of confusing.

Conclusions

RockMelt is a fantastic spin on the Google Chrome browser, packing in most of Chrome’s features and all of its speed. The collapsible social features are a fantastic addition, considering you spend most of your internet time in the browser, and most people spend most browser time on a social network or two. It just makes sense, you know? There are still a few odd issues like the lack of sidebar scrolling, and the fact that, at least for me, embedded flash videos show up as blank spaces, but these issues are the sort of thing you expect in a beta test. RockMelt still has time to make things perfect, and I think it very likely that I will keep using it as it matures.

In everything, balance. That’s the truth of the universe, I think. Heady stuff for a tech blog, but it has seen a proving in the circles we run in just the past few weeks. Yesterday, I posted about the rapid improvement and positive forward traction of Springpad. Unfortunately, at approximately the same time, another service that I have become particularly fond of, especially for its potential to improve the web experience as a whole, has had to close its doors. Unless something drastic happens in the next bit, it is very likely that Cliqset has closed its doors for good.

Cliqset is – or was – a social aggregator that attempted to take the social web to another level. They were one of the first to embrace technologies like Pubsubhubbub for real-time updating, and they also were one of the forerunners to adopt the Salmon protocol, which allows for cross-network comment conversations. Cliqset showed a lot of promise, but with the juggernaut that is Facebook and the beast that is Twitter commanding people’s attention, not to mention the harshness of the world economy, the founders, Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen, just weren’t able to pull together another round of funding. They announced that they were leaving the company in late November, which I heard about through the “grapevine” – but there was still some hope that Cliqset might remain open. I caught up with Darren on Twitter (I’m aware of the irony) and he informed me they had closed the doors just the day before, on December 7, 2010.

“A federated social Web agenda at Cliqset is something we chose to promote,” he said. “The open standards aspect is something I believe is still the future. The roadmap to getting there is going to be a little longer than we would have liked. But where these standards can be implemented and improve efficiencies, they deliver real value.”

Hopefully, someone will be able to further what Cliqset was trying to accomplish, an open social web that can see people conversing with one another in real time, regardless of their networks of choice, where content and people are the focus, not a closed network infrastructure. Maybe it’s a bit pie in the sky what with Facebook, Google, and others each trying to be the web’s evil overlord, but it’s a hope, nonetheless.